Tag: Referrals

We have added a drill down capability to the Referral Report. This is useful to see exactly what referrals have come from each referrer. Used in combination with the ability to manually add referrals to a referrer, this gives you the power to keep your top referrers happy!

With the release of our Automated Referral Rewards program, some race directors have been approached by participants wanting to get credit for a registration. This may come about because they did not share their specific link with the referral tag, or they talked with someone about your race.

If you want to give credit for these cases, you can now manually do so. Click on the “Manually Add Referred Registration” button on the Promotion > Referral Tracking > Manage Codes page. Note you need to switch the “Report Type” to “Referred Registrations” to see it as shown below:

While no race is the same, we’ve found that most race directors struggle with the same challenge: how to get participants to their event. With increased competition and continually changing media outlets, it can be difficult to stand-out. A good course, medal, and a t-shirt aren’t gonna cut it. Let’s face it, you are in the entertainment business now. There are lots of races to choose from. Your race has to have buzz. The good news is that there are some easy ways to spread the excitement about your race. Let’s start with your event advocates/ambassadors.

You already have a core group of athletes who love your event and sign up every year. Use them… the right ones. It’s critical for you to vet and qualify ambassadors — the supporters you’re entrusting to generate referrals — before enlisting them to sing your praises. Check their networks and see what kind of reach they have. Are they the right demographic for your event? You are looking for a team that has a good network and that is willing to promote your event to their own network.

After you’ve qualified Ambassadors, encourage them to share their passion through social media. To keep your ambassadors active, you can seed them with weekly missions/challenges. What are challenges? Challenges can be anything that help generate buzz around your event. For example, we ask our advocates to upload their favorite running photos using your event hashtag. Is there a price increase approaching? Have your ambassadors spread the word. Communicating your goals with the ambassadors is critical to the success of the ambassador programs.

So how do you ensure that your Ambassadors share your content? Referral incentives. RunSignUp makes it easy to distribute unique coupon codes to each ambassador through their referral tracking feature. The RunSignUp platform automatically generates a URL for each of your ambassadors and includes that in their confirmation email. Plus, RunSignUp just released a new feature that offers complete flexibility to set up your own rules for motivating Referrers. For example, you can set up a $2 refund for each new participant the referrer attracts. Or set a threshold of 5 registrations and then give the referrer $20. It’s a win-win.

Creating an ambassador program and/or setting up an automated referral system is an important factor to get increased participation for your race. In 2015, our ambassador programs accounted for 12 – 20% of all registrations.

Working with influencers and setting up referral campaigns can be time-consuming. You need to find and vet individual bloggers, create incentives and then devote resources to managing those campaigns. At Big Run Media, we take all of that work off your plate so that you can focus on the logistics of your event. We know running, we know RunSignUp and we know how to increase participation at races.

RunSignUp’s Referrals 2.0, released in late January, has been impressing races with strong early ROI results. The program allows for an automated refund of a set amount for Referrers who successfully refer a pre-determined number of registrants (as set by the Race Director). Additionally, strong social sharing tools encourage more referrals – among other things, registrants can share a personal referral link on Facebook and tag the friends they think may be interested.

Overall, among races with any referrals since February 1st, 2016, referrals have made up 7% of the 46,000+ RunSignUp registrations for races that had the referral option turned on.

Although the Race Director has the flexibility and control to select the referral reward setup that makes the most sense for them, races have seen success with a high reward amount for a high referral amount. For example, offering $25 when you hit 5 referrals (as opposed to $5 for every referral) encourages runners to reach out to multiple friends, but does not cost the race anything in refunds unless they are successful in bringing in multiple runners.

One large Next Generation Race Series that turned on Referral Rewards for $25 at a threshold of 5 referrals on 1/29/16 has seen 10% of their registrations and 13% of their registration dollars come from referrals. That’s 1,133 of their 10,966 registrations…with only $883 refunded to the Referrers, or an ROI of $41,488 (4,488).

The program is also providing big rewards for more conventional races. One major marathon that turned on Referral Refunds on 2/5/16 has seen 5% of registrations and 9% of registration dollars from Referrals. Their reward – a $2 refund for every referral up to 5 – has brought in $3,469 in registrations, with only $64 refunded to participants.

RunSignUp is the leading innovator of online tools for races registration, race day solutions, and running clubs. Services include RunSignUp for registration, RunSignUp Go for Race Day, RunSignUp RD Go for Timers, RunSignUp Clubs to enable membership management, and RaceJoy for mobile experiences. More than 10,000 race directors, timers, running club officers and running stores use these services today, including leading organizations like the Boilermaker Road Race, Crim Festival of Races, Pittsburgh Three Rivers Marathon, Inc., Fifth Third River Bank Run, Blacklight Run, Bubble Run, Night Nation, Mercedes Marathon, Kentucky Derby Festival, Leone Timing, KC Running Company, Compuscore Timing, Knoxville Track Club, Pike Peak Road Runners, Gulf Coast Runners, Columbus Running Company, Playmakers Running Store and many more. In 2015, over 10,000 races used the system to register more than 2.7 million participants. Services are free except for processing fees when conducting monetary transactions such as race registration or club membership renewal. RunSignUp is founded by runners for runners, using technical capabilities to bring the power of cloud computing to benefit the running community. For more information, visit www.RunSignUp.com.

The next time you hear that viral word of mouth marketing does not pay off for a race, show them this page (or you hear silly people say a registration vendor can’t have an impact on race registration).

We have had a couple of large race series turn on Referral Rewards. They are both doing a threshold of about ~5 people before the referrer receives a refund reward of $20. They are not turning on the coupon feature (although that is probably a good idea for more expensive races – this one is only $20).

In one race series, they turned this on 5 days ago. So far referrals have produced 10% of the new registrations (and 13% of the total $):

Here are the details. They have issued 1,926 referral codes in that time, which has drawn 7,788 page views (some of these are false positives like GMail auto-polling the page URL in the email). There have been 420 page views of the main SignUp page, with 183 completed transactions representing 237 registrations. The total registration amount is $6,731.60. They have only had to issue 10 refunds for a total of $200. A crazy 3,266% return on investment!

Here are the totals for another race series. Not quite as good – but still 6% of the total registration volume.

This also seems to work for smaller races with less volume:

Of course, we do not have enough races that have turned on this great new feature yet. We will produce more reports in about a month when we have more data. In the mean time, you should be turning this feature on and getting more registration!

To get the referral codes to work, you will need to check for a GET parameter of “raceRefCode” in your site’s URL. Then, when outputting the widget code, you will need to add raceRefCode=<CODE> to the RunSignUp URL.

As part of our Referrals 2.0 release, we have made major improvements to allow participants to share with their friends. This is enhanced when you provide incentives for participants to share, and coupons for their friends.

The enhanced sharing can be customized by going to the Promotion -> Social Sharing page. You can create dynamic custom messages at key interaction points:

Registration Confirmation to Registrant

Referral Coupon Message to Registrant

Facebook Shared Link Description – default text that will be put into the Facebook post.

Registration Email Confirmation Message – reminds the registrant in their email to share with their friends.

You will note in the above messages, there is the ability to put in the following Placeholders that will dynamically add the appropriate dynamic information:

%REFERRAL_LINK%

%COUPON%

%EXPIRATION%

We create a default example message that you can customize. We fill this with more static information for the race – such as race name, date and refund rules. Note that if you change these refund rules, you will need to modify the text. Also note that our dynamic attempt to explain your refund rules may not be as good as you can create, especially for more complex rules.

Once these are set up, then the following are examples of the pop-ups on the Confirmation page when someone registers. The first pop-up allows the registrant to share on Facebook, Twitter or EMail. Note the messages from the above setup appear on the top as instructions, and the registrant puts in their own message to their friends.

The next step is picking your friends:

There is an acknowledgement that the post went to Facebook:

And your friends are tagged in your post so they will be sure to see it! The message includes the coupon code and the discount, along with the deadline.

EMail and Twitter work in a similar manner.

Registrants are reminded on the Confirmation Page as well as in the Confirmation Email: